- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition (5 Mar 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747553122
- ISBN-13: 978-0747553120
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 130,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
War kills but so can peace. The notion of peace is as ancient as its martial adversary but behind its gentle façade can lurk a deceptively difficult sibling. Experienced foreign correspondent William Shawcross cut his teeth with Sideshow, a corrosive dismantling of the Nixon administration's policy in Cambodia. Deliver Us From Evil sees him travel to a clutch of ragged corners of the globe--Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, Sierre Leone, Rwanda, Nigeria, Afghanistan--each with individual circumstances, but all with similarly devastating results. The world may be post-Cold War but it still combusts with ferocious ease and light arms account for far more lives than heavy artillery. At the book's fast-beating heart is a frustrating dichotomy: that humanitarian relief is a frequent and increasingly complicated response that can often hinder recovery, and too often equip the oppressors. An earnest desire for conflict resolution can ignore the fact that cessation of war is only the start; as General Romeo Ballaire puts it, "Peacekeeping cannot be an end in itself--it merely buys time". The most optimistic passages here are when Shawcross travels with Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, an exceptionally sanguine and wise man trying to hold together an organisation which is less than its constituent parts, and bankrupt to boot. In the labyrinthine world of international diplomacy, thousands of miles are covered to advance an inch and egos are massaged relentlessly by hands that would perhaps rather break bones. Shawcross, part of a growing breed of dedicated inquisitors that includes Michael Ignatieff, Tim Judah and Fergal Keane, is not afraid to ask complicated questions to which there are as yet no adequate formulated responses. His valuable and vivid survey of a decade of human brutality, and the peacekeepers that stand against it, shows that "the road to hell can be paved in good intentions" but it need not prove a cul-de-sac. --David Vincent
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Shawcross is quite simply one of the best reporters of his generation' DAILY MAIL 'Shawcross stands as the foremost journalist of his generation... this is an admirable book by an admirable man' IRISH TIMES 'Shawcross has written a firsthand and readable account of the dramas in which the UN has been involved recently' NEW STATESMAN
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
William Shawcross's book provides an excellent general overview of some near-forgotten world crises and disasters, easily accessible to those who, like me, have no more knowledge than that gleaned from a twenty minute skim through the daily paper. It does go somewhat deeper than that and is full of personal encounters and thus wholly new information. It is well written and Shawcross has some of Beevor's talent for making a cliffhanger out of history. However, this book is not in the class of Stalingrad; he fails to draw a thread through chapter by chapter - the book is more like a series of individual and entertaining essays on a mass of horrific subjects.
The book is disappointing in its failure to do more, in the end, than criticise and report. I know it is asking a lot of a journo to solve the world's problems but it would have been interesting had Shawcross given us his views on what might have been done to make a real difference, and extracted some conclusions about the errors that led to such terrible disasters. In a sense he does - he kind of concludes that if it was a disaster then it should have been done differently - but that is just 20/20 hindsight dressed up as analysis. William Shawcross is an intelligent and highly experienced man with unique access to the dramatis personae, and I expected more.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book shows how little the average person knows about what is going on in conflicts around the world in OUR lifetime, both in front of the television cameras and behind the scences.
It also starts to show how split the international community is even when genocide is occuring.
Even though it covers some if not most of the conflicts in the post cold-war world briefly, it goes into just anough detail to make the reader want to know more.
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Don't think for a moment this book will tell you about the UN. It doesn't. It tries to relate various recent conflicts in which the UN were involved, but it doesn't relate them chronologically. Instead Shawcross leaps back and forth through time with no apparent logic. He also jumps from country to country for no reason - when you are deeply involved in Sierra Leone he will suddenly lob you back into Bosnia, which is enormously frustrating. It's as if when the book had finished being written all the pages were dropped and the editor didn't bother putting them back in the right order before printing them. It's a real struggle to get through. My advice is don't bother trying.
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